Open source is NASA's next frontier

The challenges to government's adoption and participation in open-source communities is often thought to be a simple culture clash, but in reality it goes deeper than that, according to NASA's newly-appointed chief technology officer.

“The issues that we need to tackle are not only cuture, but beyond culture,” said Chris Kemp, formerly chief information officer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “And I think we need new policy and support from the administration and Congress to help us tackle" them.

Kemp spoke May 5 as part of panel at the Open Government & Innovations 2010 conference, held in Washington D.C. That was the same day that NASA announced his promotion to agency CTO, a new position created to foster information technology innovation within NASA. Kemp will oversee the agency's enterprise architecture division and be responsible for the introduction of new and emerging technologies into the agency's IT planning.

And open source is a key element of Kemp's strategy. “We're actually creating a new Open Source Office under our Open Government Initiative under the Chief Technology Officer's office,” he said. “We're really taking this seriously, and we've never had this sort of visibility and interest from headquarters before.”

Developing with open source is important to the government, Kemp said, because it helps the government have an influence over emerging standards and to push commercial software providers into supporting features that benefit the government.

“We see a close correlation between the areas of new development where standards do not really exist and open-source development,” Kemp told the OGI audience.“Open-source development allows the federal government to adopt emerging standards, and to create a reference platform from standards work that's going on at NIST and various other standards bodies that are being coordinated by NIST.”

One area where NASA has relied on open source for this particular reason is NASA Nebula, an open-source stack for cloud computing. “It would be far easier for us to take some commercial products and plug them into the stack, and then we'd have a hybrid stack of software,” Kemp said. “But there are a couple of different problems -- once you start incorporating commercial software into your stack, you then lose the ability to make modifications to make those pieces of the stack integrate with everything else. You also lose the ability, as standards begin to evolve, to kind of force the standards issue.”

NASA was the first federal agency to develop a framework for releasing software developed with taxpayer funding as open source — the NASA Open Source Agreement. “Many years were invested in trying to figure out a way to work around the liability and intellectual property issues,” Kemp said, “and we got there.”

But just having the agreement — and a culture that strongly favors open source — hasn't been enough to open the floodgates. Having a cultural desire to do open-source and having the legal framework are “necessary but not sufficient,” he said. The agreement "didn't prevent NASA having concerns about intellectual property and potential issues with what was being released."

NASA still enforces "a very rigorous and bureaucratic process" that software code must go through before agency officials will approve its release to an open-source community, he said.

To overcome the organizational issues, Kemp said, “you need to actually work on really back-end processes where the right people can make the right risk asssessments on intellectual property ussues, potential ITAR issues, or other intellectual property ownership issues within the code. The reality is that the folks who are looking at this stuff don't really know what they're looking for and they're not doing deep checks anyway. And if there is someone else whose IP is released in the code that NASA releases, it's a problem."

Kemp said another major issue facing the government was finding a way to allow those outside government to participate in government-led open-source projects. Because of concerns about the ability to assure that no one's intellectual property is being usurped by code contributed to projects — possibly opening the government up to lawsuits, “it's a challenge,” said Kemp. “Though the desire is there, and a lot of people are culturally there, civil servants accepting the risk associated with this has been the primary barrier within the federal government.”

NASA is has been working on the legal framework for open-source contribution agreement for the past five years, Kemp said, and is very close to completing it.

“We're very close to releasing the first federal open-source contributor agreement, so this could essentially provide a SourceForge-like capability, where the public could make source code to NASA open-source projects, and we could review the code and then incorporate it back into projects that we can then re-release.”

FCW investigated efforts by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to improve a joint data repository on military and veteran suicides. Something as impersonal and mundane as incomplete datasets could be exacerbating a national tragedy.

The National Information Exchange Model's usefulness extends far beyond its origins in justice and law enforcement.

Reader comments

Sun, May 16, 2010

Yes, I'd like to see the CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, and others, as well as NASA research, join your open-source effort also. It's too difficult getting to their secrets now thru Israeli contacts. -- DQ

Sun, May 16, 2010

Visual studio, LOL :D Wake up, check Eclipse with QT, as an example.

Sat, May 15, 2010
CivilServant

Being considered 'a barrier', in dealing with risk of handling proprietary and Intellectual Property; I would like to remind many working in the federal government to review the reasons for the policies in place to protect administratively controlled information. It is there to protect our Industrial partner's and Small Business Initiatives Proprietary & Intellectual Property they are willing to share in maintaining the US national competitiveness Worldwide. Without nationally agreed upon proper policy and procedures in dealing with this type of responsibility the NATIONAL ECONOMIC impact can FESTER into even more decline.

Mon, May 10, 2010

One person using Visual Studio can be as productive as ten using open source tools. My objective is to produce working systems for my customers, not bow to the grail of open systems. These are all tools, I use the best, most productive tools. Politics I'll leave to others.

Sat, May 8, 2010
Mel Bowling
Huntsville, AL

Don't forget the Google & YouTube examples & what's been done per Google Earth, Google Wave, etc. in this context.
Too, the I/me self-centeredness & paranoia monsters will always be lurking, but we need to do something to bring the world leadership focus back.
How many years have we been adrift now per "post Apollo" & the NASA mission, space efforts, etc.
Iacocda may be right, "If it's 20 years old or older & adrift, shoot it thru the head & start a new focus on a realistic outcomes, rather than all the band aids & patching," in essence & my words.
More insightful comments from he "been there & done that pros, pros might also help accelerate moving this one down the field?
Very thought provoking squib. Ciao.